https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-013-2605-5
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Resonant scattering of light in a near-black-hole metric
School of Physics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052, Australia
* e-mail: g.gossel@unsw.edu.au
Received:
25
July
2013
Published online:
5
November
2013
We show that low-energy photon scattering from a body with radius R slightly larger than its Schwarzschild radius r s resembles black-hole absorption. This absorption occurs via capture resulting in one of the many long-lived, densely packed resonances that populate the continuum. The lifetimes and density of these meta-stable states tend to infinity in the limit r s →R. We determine the energy-averaged cross section for particle capture into these resonances and show that it is equal to the absorption cross section for a Schwarzschild black hole. Thus a non-singular static metric may trap photons for arbitrarily long times, making it appear completely ‘black’ before the actual formation of a black hole.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg and Società Italiana di Fisica, 2013
